Friends on holiday abroad, holed up by bad weather, pass the time by telling spooky stories by the fireside. It's a common scenario, but when three of them are Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Shelley's dauntingly clever fiancée, daughter of a famous feminist writer and an equally famous philosophical anarchist, they'll probably come up with something a bit classier than the "dark and stormy night" variety. Byron's started the vampire genre. Mary's, published in 1818, became the world's first sci-fi thriller. Remind your teenage children of this significant fact, or the often OTT language used in this gothic horror story of a murderous man-made monster running amok in the Arctic and sundry picturesque Swiss villages might make them lose heart.

And if Lord of the Flies is one of their A-level texts, they may just be interested to know that this 1857 Boys' Own adventure story about pirates, cannibals and how to survive on a Pacific island with a broken telescope and a rusty penknife was what inspired William Golding's novel. He even pinched Ballantyne's names, Ralph and Jack, for his leading characters – though there the resemblance ends. Here the boys are shining stiff-upper-lip products of empire who risk all to help each other and their friend Peterkin, who may or may not be the piggy in the middle. He sounds as if he went to a better school. This is Peterkin telling his chums what he thinks of being shipwrecked on a desert island: "I have made up my mind that it's capital, first-rate, the best thing that ever happened to us. We've got an island all to ourselves. We'll take possession in the name of the King, then we'll build a charming villa and plant a lovely garden round it, stuck all full of the most splendiferous tropical flowers, and we'll farm the land . . . and be merry." That's how small boys wearing round black straw hats, worsted socks and pocket handkerchiefs with 16 portraits of Lord Nelson printed on them and a union flag in the middle used to talk in the mid 19th century.

A bumper package for oldfashioned girls who prefer stories about becoming ballet dancers, exploring big rambling houses and waving at people on passing steam trains to stories about falling in love with boys at school who turn out to be vampires. But for Posy Fossil in Streatfeild's book, I wouldn't have gone to a stage school in the misguided hope of becoming a ballerina. Another pupil called Jenny Agutter had more luck. She landed the role of Roberta in a TV adaptation of The Railway Children when she was 15. Three unashamedly middle-class period pieces about the golden age of pre-world war (first and second) childhood.

Until I heard Callow's deceptively avuncular voice reading Orwell's opening line – "Mr Jones of the Manor Farm had locked the hen-houses for the night but was too drunk to remember to shut the popholes" – I'd forgotten that the original subtitle of Animal Farm is "A Fairy Story". It sounded uncannily like Fantastic Mr Fox hounded by that terrible trio of agricultural obsessives, Boggis, Bunce and Bean. New readers are forever reminded that Orwell's satire can be read on different levels – Ambridge without the Archers, pro-vegetarian parable, history of the Russian revolution, etc. Callow somehow manages to give a simultaneous multilevel interpretation suited to all ages. What a pro.